Critical Creative Campaigns: Making Marketing in the Age of Neuro-Capitalism

12 Jun 2016

The White Building
Sun 12 June
11am - 5pm
FREE booking required

Starting from the premise that the citizen is more than a consumer, this hands-on workshop attempts to examine and appropriate some techniques used by the burgeoning ‘neuro-marketing’ industry.

We will EXPERIMENT with neuroscientific emotion recognition technologies. We will attempt to GET AROUSED by existing adverts and artworks, and GATHER DATA about our responses. We will DISCUSS and DE-CODE how aesthetic characteristics from colour to sound and frame rate effects our response to the media we experience.

Building on the above, we will CONSTRUCT creative materials to support messages of resistance = neuromarketing campaigns for the citizen, not the consumer.

Please bring examples of what you consider “effective” adverts and artworks (these could be image-based, text-based, videos, sound etc). All are welcome to be part of this attempt to reverse-engineer how creative skills can resist technologies of political control. This workshop kick starts the first in a series of workshops led by PHUNC throughout 2016 and beyond. We invite you to join us!

What is 'Neuromarketing'?
"Neuropower is concerned not with the production of subjectivity in the present but in the creation of a perfect consumer of the future", Warren Neidich.

"Advertisements are sunshine reports for reclining flesh… a massive defensive armature created by the mediascape", Arthur Kroker.

Neuromarketing claims to help explain human behaviour by revealing what is happening inside of the "black box"of the mind (Fugate).

Until very recently the methods marketing companies used to measure market and individual consumer behaviour depended largely upon inference, either through consumer reports, surveys and focus groups. In comparison, neuromarketing uses clinical information in the form of neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG, MEG) and biophysical monitors (galvanic skin response and facial recognition) about brain activity and biological mechanisms. Leveraging science to reveal what the consumer is actually feeling. One of several emerging fields in a wider neurocapitalist industry –neuromarketing integrates marketing, economics, interaction and UX design and neuroscience with personal digital technologies- communicating to consumers of semiconscious and emotional refrains, rather than treating and trusting them as cognitive subjects, is a new reality.

Post-Human Unit for Neuro Capitalism (PHUNC)
PHUNC are a network of curators, educators, researchers, writers, artists, designers, resisters, agitators, activists.  PHUNC proposes to co-create new imaginaries and alternative systems through interventional acts of 'radical sensing'.

Initiated by Dani Admiss and Cecilia Wee in partnership with SPACE Art + Technology

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